Big sur?

[Lunarts]

It looks like Big Sur is the problem but it could be something else as well. I use the i7, 16GB Ram and 1TB HD Macbook Pro (2019) and the latest version of Publisher.

Publisher will only close after a forced stop

I am working on a photo book including 824 High resolution tiff pictures up to about 80 mb each. I cannot make a PDF because the ram is finished after 25% of writing the file. It must be a huge pdf file with all these pictures (or not).

There is a deadline coming up before it goes to the printer. 

I even thought of buying the M1 Mac Mini but the only difference is the M1 instead of the i7. M1 seems to be better with graphics.

Any advice is welcome and btw......al the best for 2021 and hopefully there will be some light behind the dark horizon for us all.

[thomaso]

Hi Lunarts,
Welcome to the Affinity forums!

31 minutes ago, Lunarts said:

Publisher will only close after a forced stop

Do you mean quitting the app via opt-cmd-esc? If yes, I wonder if the app "simply" needs more time to organize the file for its final save action, for instance to clean data which got redundant by various changes you did to objects. Even if the Activity Monitor.app reports "not responding" for an app doesn't necessarily mean the app indeed stopped working. – Or doesn't APub close even with no document opened?

35 minutes ago, Lunarts said:

I am working on a photo book including 824 High resolution tiff pictures up to about 80 mb each. I cannot make a PDF because the ram is finished after 25% of writing the file. It must be a huge pdf file with all these pictures (or not).

Possibly not a solution but a hint only: Make sure to use a document's / export color space of 8 bit (RGB or CMYK). It appears 16 or 32 bit prevent APub from image compression on PDF export and therefore will increase the exported PDF size massively.

[eluengo]

Clean install of Big Sur (MBPi7.16MBRAM.1TSSD)

No problems with designer-photo-publisher when quitting apps.
Apps possibly speedier with Big Sur than with previous OSs

Emilio 

[Old Bruce]

1 hour ago, Lunarts said:

I am working on a photo book including 824 High resolution tiff pictures up to about 80 mb each. I cannot make a PDF because the ram is finished after 25% of writing the file. It must be a huge pdf file with all these pictures (or not).

That is not a lot of RAM for that many big files so it may be cacheing to the hard drive, do you have a ton of free space on your MacBook's internal HD for this? 

Also that is a lot of files, one may be corrupt somehow causing a problem with the export. Save a copy of the publisher file, delete half of the pages and try to export, if it exports fine repeat with a new copy and the other half. Continue to save copies and halving until and if you find the problem file(s). If they exist that is.

[thomaso]

3 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

Save a copy of the publisher file, delete half of the pages and try to export, if it exports fine repeat with a new copy and the other half.

@OldBruce, did you make the experience that dividing the .afpub helps – different to just limiting the export page range?

[Old Bruce]

1 minute ago, thomaso said:

@OldBruce, did you make the experience that dividing the .afpub helps – different to just limiting the export page range?

I am working on the assumption that there is a bad image file (TIFF) in the Publisher document which is causing the failure. So maybe limiting the export range would work too. 

[Lunarts]

Thank you for the replies, I will try it out and let you know as soon as I can. To keep you busy I will post my 2021 card in (double) Dutch and wish you all an excellent creative year.

[Lunarts]

I exported the PDF files in parts. The book has 120 pages. Exporting page 1-60 (CMYK/8 bits Coated Fogra 39, PDF/X-1a:2003 ) no problem. Exporting 60-120 did not work, stopped half way and stopped Publisher as well (forced quit after one hour). Then, exporting separately page 60-90 and 90-120 no problems. CleanMyMac gave the warning of apps memory 81 GB several times on exporting 60-120. Publisher 1.8.6.

Also loading the book file takes about 20-25 minutes for 120 pages and that was never that long because this book is based on another Indesign IDML (and now Apub file) version and worked fine two months ago. I have Indesign for a couple of days left (after 15 years) and there are no problems using Indesign. 1TB HD has 615 MB left so that is not the problem. 

I checked the tiff files and I do not see any corrupt files as far as I can see that. I can open them In Affinity Photo, DXO and Luminar 4. 

[thomaso]

24 minutes ago, Lunarts said:

CleanMyMac gave the warning of apps memory 81 GB several times on exporting 60-120.

I don't know the solution for your issue but tools like this are reported on various sites (e.g. Apple Diskussions) to be unreliabale and unnecessary up to preventing macOS from working properly. So you might uninstall such tools (+ their related system files, e.g. via AppCleaner), then reboot and try APub export again.

You can get an impression of used RAM, CPU, GPU and swap size with the macOS ActivityMonitor.app. Besides its default RAM / CPU tabs it offers CPU kernel and GPU history (cmd-3 / cmd-4). Its disk and network tabs inform about the amount of written/read file sizes.

In case you don't uninstall any cleaning tool you might be interested in running EtreCheck once to analyse + list processes (incl. kernel extensions, drivers, daemons, etc.) and installed apps. It marks critical items in its resulting protocol in red with a more or less informative text, meant to enable further investigation or just internet research.

52 minutes ago, Lunarts said:

I checked the tiff files and I do not see any corrupt files as far as I can see that. I can open them In Affinity Photo, DXO and Luminar 4. 

When working daily with InDesign it happened to me about once a year that InDesign failed in export as PDF, though it exported in earlier document states. I could solve this issues by limiting the culprit image and simply deleting + placing it again. Though I didn't experience that in APub yet it might be worth a trial.

[Lunarts]

Problem solved. I deleted CleanmyMac and reinstalled Publisher, restarted the laptop and had a glass of wine and Publisher produced a full PDF, thank you thomaso for your advice. 

[thomaso]

Lunarts, thanks for your feedback! It is valuable as there are reports about such issues but usually with no information about installed software like CleanmyMac.It's a bit like religion with these tools: there are users who generally avoid contact with any of them, while others can even never imagine that they could be involved in a problem.

[Lunarts]

Well, problem is not solved. I use the max workspace and I get warnings about reaching the maximum and the Publisher stops completely. Forced stop is the only option then. I can not use Publisher anymore. My Macbook is 16 GB Ram and maybe that is the problem. I have no idea what to do. I am considering buying a Mac Mini 64 GB Ram or is the new Mac Mini M1  (but then still 16 GB) an alternative? I read about the speed and graphic possibilities of the M1. 

Update: 

Macbook pro crashes because memory usage Publisher goes over the top. Finder tells me usage is 79 GB and the crash report.. It is only happening with Publisher. I added some pictures. 

[thomaso]

1 hour ago, Lunarts said:

I use the max workspace and I get warnings about reaching the maximum and the Publisher stops completely. Forced stop is the only option then. I can not use Publisher anymore. My Macbook is 16 GB Ram and maybe that is the problem.

Oh, sorry for this bad news. Since it recently did work there might be avoidable aspects causing the issue again. In macOS there is not just RAM containing current user data but also cached + compressed + swapped parts, and macOS handles virtual memory quite well. That makes me think you don't run into an absolute limit (e.g. image file sizes) which stops APub working but rather / possibly conflicting tasks which interrupt the entire process from continuing. As you say APub isn't crashing but slowed down which makes you manually force it to quit.

For these reasons, I think that, though M1 Macs are reported to be more efficient at handling RAM (need less physical installed), a new Mac would neither be required nor a guarantee to avoid this problem. In particular if macOS Big Sur is involved to enable / allow the issue.

Instead you could try to detect what in detail is causing the issue or involved to it. Activity Monitor can be helpful to see what processes are running if the issue occurs. Via menu you can limit it to display active processes only, that might make it easier to read.

I wonder if your recently removed CleanMyMac.app still may have leftovers in your system. Note that an app file, visible in the apps folder, doesn't have to be the only task which is working when running an app. An app can launch other related processes, e.g. one to work as soon you boot your mac & login a user. Those run in background, invisible, even if you didn't launched their related 'visible' 'mother' app. Most known and obvious to users are such files in a user's startup / login configuration. Others might never become visible or obviously running to the user's eyes, even when actively using their related app (e.g. certain "agent" and "daemon" process files, designed to work hidden in background) or are noticeably running but don't display an app icon in the dock, e.g. the build-in screenshot app. Those files can be stored at various places within System and Library, for instance macOS itself uses for some of its apps the folder /System/Library/CoreServices/

So since deleting CleanMyMac did work for you at least for a while there might be hidden parts left on your disk which were not removed if you just deleted the obvious, visible app file from the apps folder. If those tasks are still running they might slow/block other processes. I see three ways to detect those possibly still existing files:

a.) searching for files within system folders + manually delete them: search terms containing any related text, e.g. parts of the app / developer / distributor names. Such a search hardly can be done with a macOS Spotlight app (it ignores certain paths when searching). Instead another search tool would work, e.g. FindAnyFile which enables a search as "root" user if you hold the option key when pressing the search button. You also might find some other, similar search apps.

b.) using AppCleaner: this app is used when deleting an app from the apps folder. It does the process described in a.) and offers a list of related files, offering to delete them together with the app. Since you have removed CleanMyMac already I don't know if AppCleaner works without get feed with an app file. Possibly you simply install CleanMyMac once more and open + close it (to create or update its related system files and folders), just to delete the app + its related system files via AppCleaner.

c.) using EtreCheck to check for critical processes: (see above)

[Lunarts]

I use Appcleaner all the the time so that might not be the problem.

Publisher is using between 78-89 GB (virtual) Ram in my project. It is a book of about 150 pages and 1145 tiff pictures of about 85 mb each. Loading takes about 15 minutes and I really have to be patient to do any changes. So, I tell you what I did. I reinstalled Publisher AND Cleanmymac. Cleanmymac warns me of ram usage and clears it on my request. So, in fact Cleanmymac is helping me now to carry on working. All this started after the upgrade to Big Sur anyway and my impression now is that Publisher 1.8.6. needs a serious update. I use Final Cut Pro as well for a 6k video and there are no problems whatsoever. I have more 'heavy' programs and everything is fine, it is Publisher only giving these problems. I hope that Affinity will come with an update soon.

[roccosaienz]

Affinity Designer way slower on Big Sur than Catalina. My Mac info: iMac (Retina 5k, 27-inch, 2017), Processor 3,4 GHZ Intel Core i5 quad-core, RAM 16GB 2400 MHz DDR4.

In particular zoom-in with gaussian blur extremely slow. I was very happy with the software before upgrading to Big Sur. Please do something!

[Gabe]

Sorry for the delayed reply. I'll have to take thomaso's side on this one. While removing that "utility" fixed it, something's still going on. Maybe other sort of "utilities" that auto clean your Mac? For that 1145 tiff files, you would need about 100gb of FREE space on your macOS disk. I'm wondering if your utilities app cleans the temp file before the export, so it's just left in limbo. 

[thomaso]

On 1/2/2021 at 12:38 PM, Lunarts said:

Update: 

@Lunarts, I haven't noticed the update of your previous post before. Thanks to your additional info the issue might be initiated by using Affinity (or any image demanding app, e.g. video) without literally be the culprit causing it. Concerning the macOS process "watchdog" causing a "kernel panic" similar error messages are reported since ~2019 (Catalina). So no third party cleaning app needs to be involved at all. Unfortunately I didn't run into any obvious + reliable solution in various posts when searching for "macos watchdog time out: no successful".

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250715149?answerId=252049220022&page=1

https://eclecticlight.co/2020/08/06/catalina-10-15-6-is-prone-to-kernel-panics-from-a-memory-leak/   (–> scroll down to the comments > more user reports)

https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/64559824   (with a trial of an explanation what's going on in detail)

The only hint I found twice (of about 5 sites) was to reset the SMC (System Management Controller), unfortunately reported as not a durable fix, but worth a trial at least. You find the how-to @ Apple, the procedure depends on your hardware model.

[Lecho]

Hi,

I worked in prepress, your images size are gigantic! Use TIFF with LWZ compression at 300dpi res, CMYK, 25-30MB At A3 artboard size. No need for any bigger file size. Unless images are not CMYK, say with more color plates etc. So PDF should be much smaller, i do it in batches as recommended above.